And he’s back! After the minor misfire of Where’d You Go Bernadette, Richard Linklater is back in a lane that makes him special. Apollo 10 1/2 finds the amazing director going back into his past and extracting something wonderful through his very specific memories around the Apollo 11 moon landing. Welcome back my guy! Maybe this will give you the clout to bring Jesse and Celine back?
That fateful Apollo mission was watched across the world by millions of people. Some of the most excited watchers were living in Houston in 1969, since NASA was headquartered there. Stanley (Milo Coy, narrated by Jack Black), a 10 1/2 year old boy at that time, was one such kid, glued to Walter Cronkite and the evening news each day during that fateful summer. The movie also is framed around Stanley being targeted by a couple NASA officials (Glen Powell and Zachary Levi) to help contribute to a secret mission, which happened right before Apollo 11 was to take place.
This movie is Richard Linklater’s loveletter to growing up in 1969 Houston. Like all of the amazing director’s best films, through specificity he finds something universal. I’ve been told by multiple people, including residents, to never visit Houston, because it is a nondescript corporate town. But thanks to Apollo 10 1/2, I would gladly visit the 1969 version of the city. Linklater’s Houston is this place perpetually with its sights on the future thanks to NASA’s presence and the post WWII corporate explosion making anything seem possible there. That optimism and fearlessness manifests inside of Stanley, who grows into adulthood over the course of this summer. Linklater interconnects the goings on at NASA with the ho-hum mundanity of Stanley’s day to day living (filled with drive ins, seatbeltless trips, and TV battles among his siblings, among many other relatable moments). At the beginning of Apollo 10 1/2, Stanley wonders if his dad (Bill Wise), a logistics manager at NASA, is actually doing anything useful. But over the course of the movie, Linklater sweetly ties all of these goings on as cogs in this giant push towards the moon, with each person in Stanley’s family, pop culture, and Houston in general contributing to the greater progress of mankind.
It’s truly amazing how tuned into time and memory Richard Linklater is. Like Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly, Apollo 10 1/2 is awash in rotoscoped animation, meaning it feels hyper real kind of vivid memory a daydreaming adult mind might wander into. The animation allows the director flights of fancy like the Moon landing bits, but ties them into these hyper real recreations of a famous JFK speech or TV programs or hippy watching in the 60s. It makes all of these moments feel of a piece: a part of some hodgepodge of images from a specific place and time that are subjectively real to the mind they came from, but objectively blurred, like all brains operate.
I wish more of my life I lived in a Richard Linklater universe. Endlessly amused and empathetic toward the human experience, a Linklater movie like Apollo 10 1/2 makes you appreciate the simple joy of existing and experiencing the minutiae of day to day lives of people. So the next time I order a Palermo’s Pizza, maybe I should stop and think I’m contributing something meaningful to my time and place instead of just to my BMI chart. Thanks Rick! Denial and nostalgia engaged!